Sunday, July 12th, Early Afternoon

Utagawa Sayuri used to live in a small farming village north of the small town of Mahora. Sayuri belonged to what had once been a fairly well to do samurai family of small repute; while they had fallen on hard times in recent years, they never went without the traditional necessities honor required a samurai family to possess in the 1830s except for one thing: a son.

Sayuri, as the only child, tried to take the place of her parents' nonexistent son. She learned the sword, the rifle, horsemanship, and every other skill she could, but she was best by far with the rifle, and, disguising her sex, even participated in several small battles and peasant rebellions until an unfortunate wound from an enemy rifle blinded her in one eye, leaving her horribly scarred and effectively ruining her for anything but a political marriage to some neglectful merchant or other unpleasant person who wanted a little samurai blood in his family.

Sayuri stabbed her first husband on their wedding night.

Having turned herself in, she was given a choice: go through a trial, bringing great dishonor to her family...or commit seppuku.

Sayuri's ghost haunted her family's land through the arrival of Commodore Perry's Black Ships, through the Meiji Restoration when Mahora began to grow in earnest, through the turn of the century and the time when the city of Mahora finally swallowed up her tiny farming village, through Japan's expansion in the pacific during World War I and the strange years following, through the war with China and World War Two, when her old home was finally destroyed by bombers. She watched in amazement as Japan's economy exploded and it became a true world power, and she became friends with another, quite younger ghost: Aisaka Sayo. Chained by her honor and regrets to her family's old home in spite of the fact that the ground that home had once occupied was now the site of an office building, Sayo was the only one to give her regular visits; the living workers came and went through the years, but Sayo was, like Sayuri, everlasting, if chained to the entire city rather than a small patch of ground.

It was from this small patch of ground in July of 2009 that Sayuri watched an abomination approach.

It was an inky black shifting shape forty feet high and hidden in a dark fog as it moved along the ground at a snail's pace, it's mere existence so unnatural as to repel the living from its path even though they couldn't see it, so utterly horrifying that Sayuri wanted to run away with all her heart and soul.

Her honor wouldn't let her flee, even if she hadn't been bound to the land.

Her friend Sayo lived in Mahora and was usually at one of the schools, directly in this... this thing's path.

For the first time in nearly two centuries, Sayuri donned her armor, put on her sword, and took up her rifle. She knew she could do little to harm it; all she could do was delay it a little and hope for the best. If that didn't work, well...she had died once before; she didn't think she'd mind doing it a second time.

Sayuri went out to face the abomination; it sensed her presence and focused its attention on her.

It was all Sayuri could do for a moment to stand her ground under that unspeakable predator's gaze, but the memory of her friend and the danger she was likely in from the monstrosity steeled her nerve. She raised her rifle to her shoulder, sighted in on what she assumed to be its head, and fired.

The bullet, made of her own ghostly essence, blasted a four foot chunk out of what had been a moment before the thing's head, and it reared back, letting out a burst of furious pressure.

Sayuri never got a second shot.

An inky black tentacle shot out at her. Sayuri leaped aside, but the end of the tentacle followed, and touched her hand; Utagawa Sayuri, samurai ghost of a hundred and seventy years, was devoured in seconds, leaving nothing behind.

Moments later, the ghost eating monster continued inexorably on its path.

"No...no...!" Negi muttered in a girl's voice as he thrashed in his hospital bed.

"Negi! Calm down! Negi!" Asuna shouted as she rushed to keep him from hurting himself. She pressed his shoulders down on the bed, but that only made him more aggressive,

"No!" Negi screamed, striking Asuna with a back handed slap across the face hard enough to knock her back just as the door opened and Reiko limped in on her cane.

Reiko took one look at the situation, and sprang into action. "Get away from him!" she screamed hoarsely at Asuna as she dropped to her knees on the floor to allow her to dig into her bag.

"Reiko! Can you tell what's wrong?" Asuna asked as she pressed herself to the wall on the other side of Negi's hospital bed. "That's not his voice!"

"It's too close!" Negi wailed as he flailed his arms and legs. His gaze darted around the room, unfocused.

"Something's attached itself to him!" Reiko had to shout to be heard over Negi's panicked babbling. "I couldn't see it before, dammit..." she muttered.

"Can you do anything?" Asuna asked, then yelped as one of Negi's flailing hands latched into her shirt and jerked her over to the bed. "Wha—hey! Wait! Negi...!"

Reiko just stared for a moment as Negi pulled Asuna into the bed with him, wrapped his arms around her, and buried his head in her chest.

"N-Negi! Wha—?" Asuna said. She felt her face heat up as she blushed all over. "Let go!"

Reiko shook herself out of her stupor and, red faced herself, reached into her bag and came up with a book of magic rituals and several items she could use to help focus power into the room for her to manipulate.

"Reiko! Help—eek! Help me!"

Reiko focused all the attention she could drag from the situation on the hospital bed on setting up her focus items, then returned to her bag for a sheaf of papers with magic circles printed on them.

"Dammit Reiko, help me!" Asuna wailed, trying to force Negi's head out of her cleavage. "He-he's gone crazy!"

"...keep him occupied," Reiko managed to say in spite of how shaky she was feeling. The power of the ghost possessing Negi, now that it had made itself known, was tremendous in this tiny room, not to mention the humiliating fact that she had somehow missed its very existence despite being one of the most powerful mediums in the whole region, but that wasn't what had her heart pounding, oh no. That honor went to the images rushing through her head which placed herself on that bed with Negi rather than the redhead; the realization of just how close that had been to actually coming true was enough to leave her breathless. Reiko herself knew just how vulnerable she was to Negi's charm; for someone who prided herself on having few weaknesses, it was a major one.

"...it's here..." Negi muttered, clearly terrified but significantly calmer now that he had had Asuna in his clutches. "It's coming to get me..."

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" president of the Fortune Telling Club, Kotobuki Minami, asked as she easily kept up with a huffing Ono Ran as the two of them ran along the sidewalk. People on the street gave the two girls odd looks as they rushed by, but neither girl paid them any mind. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Ran said between huffs.

'Wow, you're really out of shape, Ran,' Kuroi Yuina said inside Ran's head. 'We need to work on that; physical health is very important.'

'So says the ghost living in my head,' Ran thought back at her as she slowed down and finally came to a stop beside a building, leaning on it for support as she tried to catch her breath. Minami appeared completely unaffected by the run in spite of keeping up with her the whole way. "You should hurry," Ran said. "Find Mari and go somewhere far away; I'll be okay," she said, pushing herself off of the wall. She taped another sheet on the wall, this one with a different kind of magic circle drawn on it. "Go on; I'll take care of what's left," Ran said, looking off to the northeast.

Minami frowned, her body language screaming out how worried she was for her friend. "You be careful, okay Ran? If you need help, call me. Promise me, okay?"

Ran kept herself from looking at her friend's face, and nodded.

Minami gave her a piercing look, and finally nodded, clearly unsatisfied but willing to believe Ran. "You'll tell me and Mari about this once it's over, right?" She waited for Ran's reluctant nod before nodding in turn. "Take care, Ran-chan. See you later."

Ran watched her go until she went out of sight down the street, then turned her attention back to the magic circle she had just taped to the wall. "Here goes..." she said, placing the palm of her hand on the paper.

'I hope this works like you think it will,' Yuina said in her head.

"It will," Ran said aloud, and activated the circle.

Sayo jerked and looked around wildly. "What was that?! It...it's weird!"

"What?" Kazumi asked; she stopped walking and looked around for a moment. "Some kind of magic...?" she said, almost to herself.

Sayo nervously took her hand. "Come on, Kazumi-san. Let's go to where Negi-kun is; I don't like it out here...there's too much scary stuff happening..."

"...yeah," Kazumi said, a little freaked out herself by the sudden odd reverberations of magic she felt. They were incredibly small, but the effect was quite disconcerting. "Do you think it's something to do with that ghost eating monster you told me about?"

"I don't know, but it doesn't feel like that," Sayo replied, tugging on Kazumi's hand. "Let's go back now..."

They walked for perhaps five minutes before they turned on a side road and Sayo ran into the first barrier; Kazumi went right through it without even noticing its presence.

"Kazumi! Wait!" Sayo cried out. "I can't get through!"

Kazumi whirled to face the way she had come and ran back to Sayo. "What is it?"

"I don't know!" Sayo said, ghostly tears already gathering in her eyes. "It's like a wall, I can't get through!" she said frantically, pushing against the invisible barrier with all her strength. When that didn't have any effect, she smacked it as hard as she could with the palm of her hand, again to no effect.

Kazumi was beside her an instant later. "It'll be okay, Sayo-chan. Come on, let's go this way," she said, gently pulling Sayo along as she continued down the street. A minute or so later when they took another turn, Sayo hit another barrier...or perhaps the same one. "...let's go that way," Kazumi said, pointing down the road away from the wall. They had gone perhaps two hundred yards before Sayo hit another barrier parallel to the first.

"What is this?" Sayo demanded as she pouted at the invisible wall barring her progress.

"That magic we felt earlier probably came from someone activating it," Kazumi said as she hesitantly held out a hand and tried to sense the barrier. "I wonder why..." A sudden pulse in the oppressive feeling flowing between the two barriers from the northeast snapped both girls' attention back to their other problem.

Kazumi bit her lip as she used her finely tuned sense for ghosts to track the ghost eating monster's progress. "It's closer now, probably already past those big office buildings they built a while back..." she said, trailing off as she looked back at Sayo, who met her gaze nervously. "The barriers... They're..."

"...they're like a cattle chute," Sayo finished, then glanced sharply back to the northeast, toward the ghost eater. Her eyes shot back to Kazumi's, big and nervous looking. "K-Kazumi-san..." she said, putting her hand up on the invisible barrier.

Kazumi tried to swallow the sudden nervous lump in her throat and did her best to hide the dawning horror she felt at the realization that Sayo was trapped in what amounted to a cage with a ghost eating monster. "C-come on, Sayo-chan; it's not like you to give up so quickly. Let's keep going," she said, somehow managing to maintain her composure as all sorts of horrible images flowed through her mind.

"O-okay," Sayo said, taking her hand. The two of them started off down the road between the two barriers.

'Looks like everything is working properly,' Ran thought.

'That's a bad sign, usually,' Yuina promptly replied.

Ran was inclined to agree, but this was no time to wallow in pointless cynicism; she had a plan to follow, and now she had to go see a certain young man...

Ran trotted along the sidewalk, pleased that her barriers were working as they should. Every once in a while, she passed a terrified ghost or rampaging spirit trapped between them, but she couldn't spare any time for such things, and none of them approached her. To them, she was simply another human...something to ignore, even in a time like this. She couldn't help but feel a little bad as she left the ghosts and spirits to their fates, but she couldn't do anything for them. She continued on, pacing herself as well as she could.

She was passed a moment later by a red headed woman dragging along a ghost by the hand. She gave the duo an odd look and paused. She didn't know the woman, but that was definitely the ghost that attended class with her...! If Aisaka Sayo was trapped between the two barriers, then...

"Damn..." she muttered aloud.

'I'm sorry, Ran,' Yuina said.

Ran didn't reply for a moment as she plodded on, tired from a day of walking all over the city with Minami, carrying heavy bags of paper. 'I didn't want-' Her thought was cut off by a sudden burst of ghostly power from perhaps a mile ahead. This was followed almost immediately by a sudden focusing of the ghost eater's attention, maybe three miles behind her.

'There's no more time!'

"I know," Ran said. She paused a moment to catch her breath, and took off running as fast as she could. With any luck, she might find someone with a bike she could borrow, but until then...she had to get there before the ghost eater, or her whole plan would come to naught.

"Come on Reiko, how long does it take to exorcise a ghost?" Asuna demanded, clenching her teeth as Negi squeezed her more tightly than ever. He hadn't done anything but squeeze her like that, but still... Nodoka, who had arrived a few minutes before, sat at the foot of the wall by the door in a daze, her face blazing red and her eyes seeming to stare off into space after catching an eyeful of Negi and Asuna on the hospital bed. She hadn't moved since her arrival.

"There's more to this than you seem to think...!" Reiko ground out between clenched teeth as she mentally wrestled with the ghost possessing Negi. It was incredibly powerful, almost as strong as Sayo and easily the most powerful ghost she had ever tried to exorcise, and it seemed to have been attached to Negi for quite some time as well, making the job of exorcising it even harder. She could tell the ghost, evidently in some sort of mindless semi-hibernation, was scared, but she didn't care; she was frustrated too, and she was tired of looking at Negi holding Asuna so close, damn it! Her mental grip on the ghost slipped, and she lost all the ground she had gained in the last ten minutes of intense struggling.

All that effort, all that time having to watch Negi snuggling with Asuna...something in Reiko's head snapped. "You get out of him right this second...!" she shouted, grabbing Negi by the sides of his head. The next few seconds were a blur for Reiko. There was a brief image of Negi's eyes glowing an eerie purplish black even through Reiko's graying vision, Asuna squeaked as Negi squeezed her painfully tight with one arm, and then the other flashed up and the back of Negi's fist hit Reiko's cheek.

It was just a simple strike, a product of his highly trained body rather than his skill with magic or ki. Still, it left Reiko stunned. The next thing she knew, she was lying against the wall, looking at the surprised expression on Negi's face as he looked at Asuna, his arm still around her waist.

"Uh...Negi? Is that you?" Asuna asked.

Negi shoved her away off the side of the bed, ignoring her startled squawk as she hit the floor on her back, his eyes darting around frantically. He lurched up out of the bed and promptly fell flat on his face with a rather feminine cry.

"Reiko-san! Get up! I'll distract him while you exorcise the ghost!" Nodoka said, shaking her shoulder.

Reiko shook her off and looked around for her bag, which she found lying nearby. She dragged it over to her and looked at it dumbly for a moment, still dazed from the hit to the face. She heard Nodoka shouting something and looked over to see Negi scooting back into a corner on his bottom, his eyes wild and frantic as they darted from Nodoka to Asuna to Reiko and back to Nodoka again.

Reiko shook her head to clear it. "Stay away from him!" she said. "It's not Negi, it's the ghost! Use your artifact, see if you can pick up any of its thoughts through Negi," she said as she took her bag and dumped its contents on the floor to better find what she needed.

"Adeat!"

Reiko ignored Nodoka as she snatched up a small crystal pendant she used as a focus object during particularly difficult exorcisms. "Asuna! Talk to him!" she said.

"Um...uh, hi, Negi. ...how are you today?" Asuna said lamely. Negi looked frantically from face to face as if facing a bunch of strangers as he pressed his back into the corner so he could see the whole room, small as it was.

"It's no use, it's like he's asleep," Nodoka said, looking up sharply from her artifact.

Reiko ground her treeth. "Why you—" She cut herself off mid-sentence with a cry and staggered, while Negi clamped his hands to the sides of his head and let out an agonized scream, his legs thrashing. Reiko collapsed against the wall and slid down it, unable to maintain her balance. "What the hell was that?" she demanded when she had regained her breath enough to speak.

Nodoka looked from Negi, still squirming in the corner, to Reiko, and then to Asuna, who looked as taken aback by the suddenness of...whatever had just happened to the other two as she was herself. "What are you talking about? Did something just happen...?"

The door slammed open and a skinny girl with long black hair half stepped, half fell into the room. Nodoka let out a yelp as the girl almost ran into her, her chest heaving as she leaned against the wall. "You shouldn't be in here, this is a private room—" Nodoka said.

The girl pointed at Nodoka, and she collapsed in an instant, dropping her mind reading book. The girl, still frantically trying to catch her breath, swiped some of the long black hair out of her face as she headed for Negi, and Asuna caught a glimpse of a half-familiar face as she moved to block the girl's way.

"Stop right there!" Asuna demanded, her hand on the hilt of the black katana she always carried with her. The girl pointed at her, then looked up at her abruptly, her eyes wide as she locked gazes with Asuna. "Listen to me, I don't know what—hey!" Asuna shouted as the girl pointed at Reiko, who was sneaking up behind her, and dropped the sarcastic medium the same way she had dropped Nodoka. She pointed at Asuna again, and hesitated.

"Ono-san...wasn't it?" Asuna said warily. She had seen the girl around Mahora, but couldn't recall ever having spoken with her. The only way she knew the girl's name and face, in fact, was because she had seen Ono's picture in Negi's class roster.

The girl sucked in a quick breath.

"You're the one who knocked out Negi," Asuna said, her voice menacing as she took a step forward. Ono Ran took another step back, clenched her teeth, and pointed at Asuna again.

"Why isn't it working?!" the girl said, as if to herself. Her eyebrows went up in surprise a few seconds later. "Magic cancel?!"

Asuna paused in the middle of another menacing step forward. "How do you know that?" she demanded.

Ran looked past Asuna to Negi, then back to Asuna, and tried to dart past her toward the teacher.

Asuna snagged the tired, unathletic girl around the middle and grunted as she lifted her up off the ground and held her kicking in the air.

"Put me down!"

"No! Not until you explain whatever it is you're trying to accomplish by knocking out my friends!" Asuna bellowed as she gave Ran a good shake. "What did you do to them?" she demanded. She was pleasantly surprised to see Nodoka already starting to stir. Ran stayed silent, so Asuna shook her again, a little more violently, then heaved her over onto the hospital bed and climbed up on top of her, using her knees to pin Ran's arms next to her body. "What's going on? Did you do something to stir up the ghosts? Answer me!"

Ran looked stubbornly away, until her eyes caught sight of Negi again, obviously dazed and barely able to think, and yet watching her and Asuna like a cornered animal.

"I did," Ran said.

Asuna squeezed the girl a little tighter; from the way Ran squirmed, she definitely felt it. "Undo it."

"I can't," Ran said quickly. "There's a monster out there, one that eats ghosts..." she said, then paused as if suddenly wondering if she should have said as much as she had.

Asuna looked down at the girl, her expression cold and distant in spite of the horror she felt inside at the idea of a creature that ate ghosts. She couldn't see them herself except under special circumstances, but that didn't mean she thought ghosts weren't people just like the living. She had gone to school with one for goodness' sake...! "Did you bring it here?" she asked, her voice colder than she had intended.

"No. I trapped it; it's out there in front of the building now. It's after her," she said, jerking her head toward Negi.

"She's telling the truth," Nodoka said suddenly. Ran jerked in surprise under Asuna, but remained firmly pinned.

"Damn you, you little brat," Reiko growled as she dragged herself upright by the bed, rubbing her forehead. "What did you do to me?"

"She 'overloaded your mental processes', it says," Nodoka read from her artifact, then looked up sharply at Ran. "She's talking to someone else in her head...is it telepathy?" she asked Ran, then looked back down at her book. Her eyebrows shot up. "There's someone else in her head with her! What's the other person's name?" Nodoka quickly called up a second instance of her artifact, a skill she had developed shortly after first receiving her pactio with Negi and had managed to perfect a year later. If pushed, she could summon dozens upon dozens of extras; she had done so, on occasion, and used an extremely complex variation of the same skill to run the mental networks all of Negi's friends and followers relied upon so often. "Kuroi Yuina," Nodoka said aloud. "Asuna! Look out!"

'Ran! I'm taking over!' Yuina said.

'Wait...!'

Ran felt herself shoved back into her own head and had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming at the frightful sensation...until she realized she no longer had a tongue.

'Yuina! What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?!'

'Hold on, Ran! Just hold on!'

Asuna glanced back at Nodoka, a question forming on her lips when Ran lurched under her with an impossible display of strength from that slender body and heaved her off. Asuna hit the floor and was up again half a second later, her sword drawn and the tip held against Ran's throat as she stood in front of Negi.

"You are making a mistake," Ran said, her voice different, lower, the voice of a mature woman rather than a fourteen year old girl. Her eyes were different as well, sharper, older, more confident of her ability...the eyes of someone who had been through hell and back, the eyes of a survivor. Asuna knew the look; she saw it in the mirror every morning and in many of her friends.

"Who are you? What did you do to Negi's student?" Asuna demanded, locking gazes with the person in Ran's body.

"We are running out of time; Aisaka Sayo is trapped out there with the Ghost Eater; are you ready to sacrifice her existence to ask a few pointless questions?"

"Nodoka?" Asuna asked without breaking her gaze.

"She's telling the truth," Nodoka said, sounding sick. "Asuna..."

"Dammit," Reiko said, then let out a searing string of invectives as she threw the door open and staggered out into the hallway.

"Reiko will—"

"She's not strong enough," Ran said, cutting Asuna off. "Not to destroy the ghost eater before my barriers break. Not even Aisaka is strong enough. This one, though, this is the one the ghost eater is after," Ran said, then, with a motion of her arm so casual Asuna didn't notice it until it was too late to react, slapped the blade away from her throat and laid the palm of her hand on Negi's forehead. Negi let out a strangled scream, his back arching as his limbs went stiff. The ghost in possession of Ono Ran's body grunted with the effort of controlling the ghost possessing Negi's body. "Get that medium before she leaves the building! Quickly! Quickly!" she shouted back at Asuna.

Asuna shot a quick glance at Nodoka, who nodded at her, and bolted out through the door. Outside the room, the hallway held several groggy members of the security team, evidently more victims of Ono Ran. Asuna swore under her breath as she ran past them.

—Asuna, wait! Don't go outside!—

Asuna skidded to a halt just outside the stairwell that led up to ground level. 'Nodoka? Why? What's going on?' she thought back at the other woman. That had definitely been panic in Nodoka's voice...

—Ono-I mean Kuroi-san says if you go outside, your magic cancellation ability might destroy the ghost eater's trap. I've contacted Kazumi...she's outside with Sayo-chan. She says Sayo's safe; she was outside the cage when it activated. If she had been just a little slower...—

Asuna heaved a sigh of relief. 'What about Reiko?'

—I've called her back. Asuna...Kuroi-san seems to know what she's doing, but I don't trust her. From what I can tell, she's thousands of years old, and...and she can block my mind reading.—

Asuna blinked at that. Kuroi Yuina, the ghost in Ran-chan's head, could block Nodoka's telepathy...? That was a rare skill...it happened from time to time, sure, but that didn't make it any less shocking when it did. Asuna could count the number of people who had been able to block Nodoka's pactio skill over the past six years on one hand and still have room for Kuroi. Asuna shook her head and set that thought aside to deal with later as she looked at the door to the stairwell; judging by what she was hearing, someone was coming down in a hurry. She heard Reiko shout something in an unmistakably relieved tone of voice, and couldn't help but smile. 'That has to be Kazumi and Sayo-chan,' she thought to herself. The stairs were quite long and Reiko was in terrible shape; it was no wonder she hadn't even made it all the way up to ground level yet. She opened the door. "Come on, hurry up! There's no time to waste!" she shouted up.

"Coming down!" Kazumi shouted back. Kazumi and Reiko both came down a moment later, Kazumi smirking at Reiko and Reiko huffing as she glared at Kazumi, for all the world as if nothing was wrong.

"Is Sayo-chan here?" Asuna asked. Kazumi and Reiko both answered in the affirmative, then looked at each other. Reiko rolled her eyes, a move unintentionally mirrored by Kazumi, and Asuna led them back to the room.

Author's Notes: Next chapter is the last of the Darkness arc. It won't be long after that that Book 2 ends. Remember "Meet the New Class", my collection of short stories based around the members of the new class? Well, "Meet the Old Class" will come out between Book 2 and Book 3. Look forward to it!